Should I Learn Google Dart As A First Language?: Swallowing The JavaScript Pill

Let’s get this out of the way. I’m an indecisive person. I’m the guy that’ll be in store looking at 2-10 different bottles of sunblock for an hour while one of my best friends is standing there with his hand freezing because he got a gallon of milk (thanks Kyle for always putting up with me!!!). All the while thinking this would have been much easier if I had only done the 2-4 weeks of research I usually do before buying a product (not joking).

Knowing the above, the world of programming is my own little level of Dante’s Inferno. So many choices from languages to frameworks. I went to a coding bootcamp and I took a very shallow dive into several languages, now it’s time to take a deep dive into a stack (frontend and backend). This came down to JavaScript, JavaScript/Python, or Google’s new language Dart.

It has been utter turmoil for me the past few weeks as I took a shallow look at these languages. The real decision was between JavaScript and its new competitor Dart. I’m a calculated risk type of guy and Dart is definitely a high risk / high reward scenario for Google, but what about the common man? This is where practicality wins out. I’m going to be learning JavaScript, for how long? Until I make something presentable for a project!! So months at least.

There are a lot of reasons to pick JavaScript over Dart, but the main reason for me, legacy code (ewww). Like it or not most of the web has some sort of JavaScript in it and it’s still worth learning now even as Ecmascript 6 is soon to be released, and all the frameworks that came out in the past few years are gaining traction. While learning Dart is something I still plan to do it isn’t worth being the first language I take a deep dive into because when I look for a position as a programmer I will most likely still need to deal with JavaScript code and it will be expected that I know it.

So for all the new programmers out there trying to make this decision I hope you found this helpful. I only stated one reason to learn JavaScript, but I think it’s the most important one when picking a first language. A language you will have to deal with anyways. Right now choosing to not learn JavaScript is like choosing to not learn HTML/CSS.